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Sarcastic Android 'Lyric Explainer Video' Urges Apple to Adopt RCS in Messages

dannys1 said:
Messages works fine when you're messaging other iPhones - but if you need a cross platform chat that works as well as Messages you need a 3rd party app - which is why everyone in Europe is on Whatsapp, i'm not sure why this is so different in the US.

I don't personally like Whatsapp but I still have it for a few friends that are on Android and don't use any other apps - I also use Facebook messenger for other people but my app of choice would be Signal where i have specifically 3 friends who won't use Whatsapp and don't have iPhones.
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Gotcha, I think my android friends are on messenger too so If I need to send them video or pdfs I use
that but between those two, I'm covered.
 
dannys1 said:
I think it would because MMS is not a substitute for being able to just fling over a 4k video you recorded of something to your friend. (nor pictures that look straight from your camera roll etc)
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Yeah, but back then, 4k video was not something users had to contend with. For countries outside the US, it really was mainly about avoiding the SMS fees. If those fees weren’t there, I think a WhatsApp still could have happened, but it would not have been as pervasive.
 
dannys1 said:
If it's SMS, everyone I suspect.
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I guess it depends on where you are. My plan has free text msgs globally. YMMV

dannys1 said:
People call iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, text messages too - it doesn't just have to be text, it just means an instant message.
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Yea. iMessage probably is what many people now consider texting, especially sine it is the default app on iPhones.

dannys1 said:
It'd be great to have one app to rule them all but that's not going to happen and unless it was an open standard not run by a company it wouldn't be a good idea either.
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The issue with an open standard is it becomes the de minimus standard that each carrier, app developer and phone manufacturer will expand to add features to gain a competitive edge. We already see that with the fragmentation of the messaging app market.

Then there is the whole security issue with doing strong encryption and hwo to ensure keys aren't made available to outside agencies.

dannys1 said:
China and Asian will always have WeChat, Europe, Latin America, Africa and India will always have Whatsapp. It's the US that's the odd one out here that somehow doesn't mind mixing rich text messaging with basic SMS - for the rest of the world I think we'd happily turn SMS off, it's barely used and I don't see any operators bothering to upgrade to the rich text version of SMS outside of the US, it'd be a waste of their time and money.
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I suspect it will stay that way for a long time.
 
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Unregistered 4U said:
Yeah, but back then, 4k video was not something users had to contend with. For countries outside the US, it really was mainly about avoiding the SMS fees. If those fees weren’t there, I think a WhatsApp still could have happened, but it would not have been as pervasive.
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I mean that was one of the early things - but WhatsApp came out before iMessage. WhatsApp brought a lot of BBM users over to modern smartphones and it was an iOS exclusive to start with. Now it's just a reliable app that lets you have group chats and rich text, in many ways it's still better than iMessage. I've never had group chats in Messages, all my group chats have been in Whatsapp. There were other apps that took off for a while too, Kik being one and there are more privacy focused ones like Signal my friends are on - Whatsapp just stays there because everyone has it so it's the one place you can always message someone without having to use SMS.
 
dannys1 said:
Now it's just a reliable app that lets you have group chats and rich text, in many ways it's still better than iMessage.
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It does WAY more than that now, though. There are some countries that have based their e-infrastructure on WhatsApp. And, it got that power simply from being less expensive than SMS which drove it to be installed on every SMS capable phone that could also load apps outside the US.

Someone in the US that doesn’t have WhatsApp just can’t communicate with someone on WhatsApp. For people in some countries, there’s actual governmental legal business that can’t be performed without WhatsApp.
 
Unregistered 4U said:
It does WAY more than that now, though. There are some countries that have based their e-infrastructure on WhatsApp. And, it got that power simply from being less expensive than SMS which drove it to be installed on every SMS capable phone that could also load apps outside the US.

Someone in the US that doesn’t have WhatsApp just can’t communicate with someone on WhatsApp. For people in some countries, there’s actual governmental legal business that can’t be performed without WhatsApp.
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Again I don't think it's just because it was cheaper than SMS. SMS were unlimited in all contracts in the UK LONG before smartphones even existed let alone Whatsapp.

WhatsApp was like BBM for Blackberry users and it was like desktop messaging services (MSN messenger, yahoo etc) for phones. SMS is just very very basic no frills way of sending a few characters of text. Whatsapp let you send unlimited amounts of tax, reactions, gifs, video, pictures, group chats, see sent/received/read notifications, set statuses - and this was all early on before VOIP, video calling and UI improvements.
 
iMessage is a history of DoS and security incidents and should be dumped.
 
mi7chy said:
iMessage is a history of DoS and security incidents and should be dumped.
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This is the first time I've heard of this. Can you link any news story for this? I've heard of attacks sent through iMessage but those were just links that could have been sent through Whatsapp or any messing service.
 
Unregistered 4U said:
Unlimited international SMS was free? Because, that’s what WhatsApp offered.
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No but your average person in the UK wasn't sending international SMS, they were messaging their local friends (sometimes friends in the same room!). International messaging will have been much much lower on the list than the reasons above. A big reason for Brits will have been that they could go on their yearly holiday to Spain and text home for free (although having said that they probably weren't getting free Wifi in hotels or international data in the early 2000s)

I asked my girlfriend who is completely not tech savvy but has an iPhone. I make send me stuff on Messages as I don't really like WhatsApp I like to have messages on the Mac more than anywhere else (and it means I don't need WhatsApp desktop open) she said i'm the only person she sends "normal texts" too - she doesn't even understand iMessage isn't a normal SMS. Everyone else is on WhatsApp, her entire family are in group chats on it, all her friends are in group chats on it. If I could i'd remove WhatsApp from my phone but it's the only app you know everyone is going to be on regardless of phone so you will need it to contact someone at some point.
 
visualseed said:
You left out a few things. Unless you are among those that naively think that all messaging services are just dumb pipes you can drop messages on with a recipient's phone number and they will just be on their merry way - like all the stuff that actually makes that work. The "protocol" to send a message is the proprietary IP that actually makes each messaging service unique and would represent a huge chunk of third-party code being embedded in iMessage (I suppose you will also want people to be able to respond to these message in whatever client they receive them in and see those response in iMessage.) You still haven't addressed the issues of message persistence across devices, encryption keys, or which service handles and pays for the notifications, etc. There is a reason why the average messaging app is over 100mb. There is nothing "simply" about it and it's not Apple's business to consolidate a bunch of services that work just fine by themselves into a UI that most people are going to hate anyway. Your whole premise that SMS is a "fallback" is wrong as well as that is not actually what is happening.
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The third party messaging app (e.g. WhatsApp, LINE, etc.) would still be there! If you want a particular messaging service/protocol, you'd still go to the App Store and install the "native" app. This would just be an API that the messaging app could register to for basic functionality within iMessage, that's all. There are broadly similar Apple APIs already, notably for integration with iOS/iPadOS Notifications and for recent call/missed call logging in the Phone app.
 
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